Photos, Marvel Insider Points, and Dreams of Lila Cheney at the Marvel Young Guns Panel

The Marvel Young Guns panel at C2E2 was moderated by Rickey Purdin and featured:

Marco Checchetto with his translator from Italy working on Old Man HawkeyeMike Del Mundo from Canada working on Thor (who grew up influenced by hip hop)Javier Garron from Spain working on Antman and the WaspAaron Kuder from America working on Infinity CountdownPepe Larraz from Spain working on Avengers
(Russell Dauterman not in attendance)

This panel was hosted by Editor-in-Chief C.B. Cebluski (the C is for Chester), featuring Marvel’s top up-and-coming artists. CB started by introducing the fact that when JoeQuesada come on as Editor-in-Chief years back he coined the Young Guns artists to let them be spotlighted on top books and help develop their careers. The rookie class years back included Steve McNiven and Jim Cheung — the program has been going for over 10 years.

Marvel has been releasing Young Guns variant covers to spotlight the artists and will continue to do so. These books have no trade dress and the idea is to focus more on the art — the back of the books also have the info. When the initial Young Guns variants came out there was a theme as to who the characters are, and in the background there are letters that spell Marvel.

Garron grew up reading Flash by Mark Waid and is excited to now be working on Ant-Man and Wasp with Waid. Garron is from a small town in Spain and lives one hour from the town Carlos Pacheco is from, which gave him the inspiration to launch his decade-long journey to break into American comics. When he was just about to give up, he quit his day job and dedicated all of his resources to breaking in — and three months before he was going to give up on it, he finally broke into the market.

Aaron Kuder talked about being influenced by Art Adams, Mike Golden, and Mobius. He found that he was really into artists that had a high level of detail. Since in comics there is no budget like in movies, he feels he can add as much detail as he wants.

Pepe Larraz discusses how hard it was to keep all the secrets for Avengers. He started the series in April of 2017, but he needed to have a lot of the books done in advance due to the book coming out weekly. He also talked about how they used so many characters in these recent Avengers books, and he was very pleased with how hard he worked to get each character their due as well as depth.

He said he would love to work with the Guardians of the Galaxy or the X-Men, and his biggest challenge is drawing Captain America because he feels it’s like drawing a statue of a living legend.

His next book will be X-Men X-Termination with Ed Brisson. He and his brothers said if he would ever get paid to draw one page of X-Men, he and his three brothers would all get X-Men tattoos — so now he and all three brothers have an X tattoo.

Checchetto was asked which character he’d like to work on — he said Ghost Rider and that he would also really like to co-write it. Aaron Kuder said his dream job would be to draw and write a book about Lila Cheney.

Check out more photos from the panel below, along with a code you can redeem for 20,000 Marvel Insider points:

A prophecy says that in the comic book industry's darkest days, a hero will come to lead the people through a plague of overpriced floppies, incentive variant covers, #1 issue reboots, and super-mega-crossover events.

Scourge of Rich Johnston, maker of puns, and seeker of the Snyder Cut, Jude Terror, sadly, is not the hero comics needs right now... but he's the one the industry deserves.